Thomas Perry’s ‘Forty Thieves,’ and More

Image

CreditChristoph Niemann

By Marilyn Stasio

Dec. 31, 2015

Nick and Nora Charles they’re not. But while Sid and Veronica Abel may be lacking in urbanity, these private investigators are no less brainy and far better marksmen. Appearing for the first time in Thomas Perry’s new thriller, FORTY THIEVES (Mysterious, $26), these former Los Angeles police detectives have been married for over 30 years and have children and grandchildren. That confers on them the wisdom of the ancients, along with the cloak of invisibility in a youth-obsessed society, which suits them just fine. (“Do you have any idea what gray hair is worth in our business?”)

But are Sid and Ronnie a match for Ed and Nicole Hoyt, the younger married assassins who have been hired to kill them? Nicole is the bomb maker and sharpshooter, and Ed . . . well, “Ed was kind of scary in person,” even according to his wife, and he has the instinctive cunning of a predator. (“Whatever tigers had, he had.”) Hired hit men are only in it for the money, so the Hoyts have no idea why their client wants the Abels dead. But the Abels suspect they’re being targeted because of their current case, an abandoned police investigation into the year-old murder of a research scientist whose body was tossed into a storm sewer.

Not the nicest guy in the world, it turns out, when Sid and Ronnie start interviewing his ex-wife and the women he dated. As Perry acknowledges, only about 10 percent of the killings in this country are committed by women, and only 3 percent of all murders are murders for hire. So realism isn’t the name of this game, which features at least three lethal women. “You look pretty with a gun,” observes a guy who’s about to execute one of them, in a carefully built plot that has more twists than an elderly rattlesnake has rattles.

The tips you learn in a Perry novel are priceless: how to climb a staircase without making a sound, how to smuggle diamonds on (not in) your person. Although Perry’s characters are primarily noted for their technical skills, the jewel thieves in this narrative are also notable for their peculiar code of ethics. They’ll put a bullet into a person they love and then rob that dead comrade in a gesture as natural as “picking up a fallen soldier’s ammunition on a battlefield.”

*

Before the miracle of DNA testing, a suspense story could hinge on the mystery of a child’s parentage. The French author Michel Bussi takes advantage of that opportunity by opening AFTER THE CRASH (Hachette, $26) in 1980 and making a 3-month-old girl the sole survivor of a plane crash at the French-Swiss border in the Alps. Since there were two infants on the plane, it falls to a judge to determine which pair of grandparents can legally claim the “miracle child” — the ­working-class Vitrals or Léonce and Mathilde de Carville, who preside over a wealthy international clan. The solution, which arrives 18 years later, when the girl comes of age, is wonderfully ingenious and altogether satisfying. But you could bite your fingernails to the quick from the strain of following Bussi’s baroque narrative style, which in Sam Taylor’s translation is elegant in design, intellectually rigorous, infuriatingly ruminative and precise to the point of mannerism. In other words, very, very French.

*

“You’d be surprised how many fugitives think Maine’s a good place to vanish,” says Cody Chevrier, the Aroostook County sheriff in THE GIRLS SHE LEFT BEHIND (Bantam, $26). “Like nobody here’s gonna notice some strange guy the minute he hits town.” In her second police procedural set in a fictional town on the edge of the Great North Woods, Sarah Graves experiments with clashing styles to tell a story about the trouble outsiders can bring to a village like Bearkill, where her tough-minded sheriff’s deputy, Lizzie Snow, helps keep the peace.

Graves writes at full strength when she’s focused on this economically depressed region, once the hub of a thriving lumber industry but now mostly the domain of meth cooks, unhappy teenagers and scores of volunteer firefighters battling tenacious blazes in the surrounding forest. But the crazy invaders from out of state who come to Bearkill to commit murder and mayhem belong in some other genre — maybe a horror movie? — and some other place, not in this rugged landscape with its down-to-earth characters.

*

Falling in love can transform you. A Japanese college student’s life is changed forever in ­Fuminori Nakamura’s THE GUN (Soho, $25.95) when he falls in love with a gun. Nishikawa is so entranced by the beauty of this weapon, which he finds when he stumbles upon a dead body lying under a bridge, that he takes it home and makes it an object of devotion. “I really didn’t make a habit of thinking too hard about right and wrong,” he explains. But once he starts carrying the gun he finds himself pondering its sole existential purpose — to shoot — and he soon feels it “beseeching” him to acknowledge his own existential purpose by shooting someone. Will he? Won’t he? More a suspenseful study of obsession than a crime novel, Nakamura’s noir story, translated by Allison Markin Powell, is about liberation. According to his repressed protagonist, “It was better not to engage in introspection or self-awareness.” But love, even illicit love, has a way of bringing out the best — or the worst — in ­a person.